IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The photo on the left shows the rapidly eroding sand dunes—essentially glacial till—near Eastham, Cape Cod, Mass. The houses are in an increasingly precarious position! On the right is a view of the coastal sand dunes near Provincetown, Cape Cod, Mass, taken from the National Park visitor center. They are partly vegetated, and so are relatively stable (unlike the Eastham dunes). Photos: Andrew Carleton.

GOOD NEWS

Penn State students, faculty and staff, as well as local community members (ages 18 and older) are encouraged to attend a free bike safety workshop on Thursday, Sept. 28 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. at 117 Weston Community Center at Penn State’s White Course Apartments.All participants must bring a bike and helmet to participate. Participants will receive a free pair of Penn State bike lights.

The AAG is currently seeking panelists, workshop facilitators, career mentors, and presenters encompassing a wide range of professional backgrounds, interests, and experiences to participate in careers and professional development outreach during the 2018 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. To present in one of these sessions, please submit your abstract at annualmeeting.aag.org. When you receive confirmation of a successful abstract submission, please then forward this confirmation to: careers@aag.org. The abstract deadline is October 25, 2017.

NEWS

September 29 Coffee Hour with Guido Cervone: Citizen Science During Nuclear Emergency: Analysis of The Fukushima-Dahichi Nuclear Accident
The 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident resulted in a series of controlled and accidental releases of radioactive Cesium in the environment. The citizen science Safecast project was started immediately after the accident to map radiation using off the shelf instruments, and generated over 60 million observations since April 2011. A robust methodology is presented to calibrate contributed Safecast radiation measurements acquired between 2011 and 2016 in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan. The Safecast data are calibrated using official observations acquired by the U.S. Department of Energy at the time of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi power plant nuclear accident.

3:30 to 5:00 p.m.: Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.; the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.

Environmental Inquiry minor encourages environmental curiosity, literacyAddressing environmental concerns, enriching a wide range of majors and making an impact in the community — those are some of the benefits the Environmental Inquiry (ENVI) minor offers, according to Larry Gorenflo, faculty-in-charge of ENVI and professor of landscape architecture and geography at Penn State. The minor recently launched a new website.

[Editor’s note: The Summer 2017 GEOGRAPH Newsletter was published and mailed in August. We are placed the articles on the department website and will highlight this content during the fall. Want to get your copy in the mail? Send your postal address to geography@psu.edu]

From the Summer 2017 GEOGRAPH newsletterSWIG chapter promotes equity through outreach
Penn State’s chapter of Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) recognizes the role of gender, sexuality, race, and class in the organization of our everyday lives and aims to promote and empower individuals within geography by offering a supportive network and opportunities to grow professionally, intellectually, and personally.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

Applying Critical Race And Memory Studies To University Place Naming Controversies: Toward A Responsible Landscape Policy
By Jordan Brasher, Derek H. Alderman, Joshua Inwood
Forthcoming in Papers In Applied Geography
Access http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpag20/current
A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the long-time commemoration and valorization of white supremacy through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, activists have called for—and in some instances succeeded—in removing from university buildings the names of historical figures shrouded in racial controversy. However, for the broader public and even sympathetic higher education officials, there is a lack of understanding about why these demands are important and even less recognition about the violence that racially insensitive place naming inflicts on the belonging of marginalized groups. Instead, the renaming of campus landscapes is understood as merely an act of political correctness and thus campus authorities have offered uneven and incomplete solutions in the name of progressive reform. Applying recent innovations in race and memory studies, specifically the ideas of “wounded” places and “memory-work,” we situate ongoing university place naming controversies in a critical context. Specifically, we build upon the recent work of law scholar Stephen Clowney and discuss the opportunities and challenges of developing a policy of landscape fairness that recognizes the power of place to transmit ideas about racial power across generations and the right of critics to challenge dominant historical narratives.

Analysis of errors introduced by geographic coordinate systems onweather numeric prediction modeling
By Yanni Cao, Guido Cervone, Zachary Barkley, Thomas Lauvaux, Aijun Deng, and Alan Taylor
In Geosci. Model Dev., 10, 3425–3440, 2017
Access https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3425-2017
Most atmospheric models, including the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, use a spherical geographic coordinate system to internally represent input data and perform computations. However, most geographic information system (GIS) input data used by the models are based on a spheroid datum because it better represents the actual geometry of the earth. WRF and other atmospheric models use these GIS input layers as if they were in a spherical coordinate system without accounting for the difference in datum. When GIS layers are not properly reprojected, latitudinal errors of up to 21 km in the midlatitudes are introduced. Recent studies have suggested that for very high-resolution applications, the difference in datum in the GIS input data (e.g., terrain land use, orography) should be taken into account. However, the magnitude of errors introduced by the difference in coordinate systems remains unclear. This research quantiﬁes the effect of using a spherical vs. a spheroid datum for the input GIS layers used by WRF to study greenhouse gas transport and dispersion in northeast Pennsylvania.

Developing and Evaluating VR Field Trips
By Oprean D., Wallgrün J.O., Pinto Duarte J.M., Verniz D., Zhao J., Klippel A.
In Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017)
Access https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63946-8_22
We present our work on creating and assessing virtual field trip experiences using different VR and AR setups. In comparative studies, we address the question of how different settings and technologies compare regarding their ability to convey different kinds of spatial information and to foster spatial learning. We focus on a case study on an informal settlement in Rio, Brazil, in which we used an informal assessment to help inform and improve the design of different VR site experiences.

Immersive Technologies and Experiences for Archaeological Site Exploration and Analysis
By Wallgrün J.O., Jiawei Huang, Jiayan Zhao, Claire Ebert, Paul Roddy, Jaime Awe, Tim Murtha, Alexander KlippelIn Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017)
Access https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-63946-8_48
Immersive technologies have the potential to significantly improve and disruptively change the future of education and research. The representational opportunities and characteristics of immersive technologies are so unique that only the recent development in mass access fostered by heavy industry investments will allow for a large-scale assessment of the prospects. To further our understanding, this paper describes a project that aims at creating a comprehensive suite of immersive applications for archeological sites, including 360∘ immersive tours, skywalks, and self-guided explorations for education, and immersive workbenches for researchers.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Sustainability Institute at Penn State is piloting a new program called EcoChallenge to choose actions to reduce your impact. You pick your own challenge and set a goal that stretches your comfort zone and makes a difference for you, your community, and the planet. Challenges encompass a variety of eco-issues such as waste, food, health, transportation, energy, water, and nature, and range in difficulty. For example, one challenge could be using a reusable water bottle each day, while another challenge could be carrying your trash that you accumulate throughout the duration of the challenge.

GOOD NEWS

Azita Ranjbar successfully defended her dissertation on August 11, and has started a new faculty position as assistant professor of women gender and sexuality studies at Ohio State University

Lorraine Dowler and Azita Ranjbar just had an article accepted to the Annals of the Association of American Geographers titled, “Just Praxis in the City: Positive Security in Belfast and Orumiyeh.”

Kelsey Brain has been awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship for her dissertation research in Costa Rica.

Mikael Hiestand and Andrew Yoder passed their FAA Section 107 Pilots exam this week and are now able to legally fly small unmanned systems under Section 107 rules.

NEWS

September 22 Coffee Hour with Don McCandless: Research to Start-Up: Initial steps to technology commercialization for Penn StatersThe thought of translating fundamental research into a commercial product can appear mysterious and daunting to many in the research and academic community. However, there is a process, with multiple pathways, that can be followed to increase the chances of success. These paths are lumpy, not linear. But by creating and investigating “Business Models” (not a “Business Plan”), researchers can get a better idea on whether there is actually a commercial need for their proposed product/service. This process is currently being implemented at the national level thru I-Corps programming at NSF and NIH, as well as by the 68 teams in the past five years in our TechCelerator@StateCollege Entrepreneurial boot camps. Today’s talk will outline several ways to get started, including an overview of licensing, funding options, prototyping, team formation, and customer discovery techniques.

3:30 to 5:00 p.m.: Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.; the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.

GEOGRAPH SU17: From the Department Head(Your name here): Building community, supporting international travel, and celebrating excellence
A few times during the year, our college development folks email me about upcoming visits with alumni, and they ask me what our department funding priorities are. They might also ask what specific opportunities exist for someone with a special focus on x-y-z. So, as head, I need to think about our development priorities from two different points of view; first, what will strengthen and position the department overall for success, and second, what unique projects will appeal most to particular donors. I currently have four things on my general department funding wish list:

Penn State Online Geospatial Education advisory board meets
On Monday, August 28, the advisory board for the Penn State Online Geospatial Education program held its annual meeting. Each year, the board evaluates the MGIS degree and GIS, GEOINT, and Remote Sensing certificate programs. Members provide advice and insight on how we can continually refine our classes and programs to anticipate the needs of geospatial professionals and society. Members of the Advisory Board include senior leaders from Esri, CARTO, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, eMap International, 18F, and Azavea, as well as from academic units within and outside of Penn State. Several board members are alumni of the Department of Geography and our online programs, ensuring that we have the voices of our students as well as their potential employers in mind.

At the 2017 meeting, board members reviewed course content with faculty and made suggestions on how to build upon the program’s strengths. Engagement with the board enhances our ability to respond to continuing changes in the geospatial professional landscape. In the year ahead we will be redesigning our core GIS Certificate courses based in part on Advisory Board recommendations.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

SensePlace3: a geovisual framework to analyze place–time–attribute information in social media
By Scott Pezanowski, Alan M MacEachren, Alexander Savelyev & Anthony C Robinson
In Cartography and Geographic Information Science
Access http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2017.1370391
SensePlace3 (SP3) is a geovisual analytics framework and web application that supports overview + detail analysis of social media, focusing on extracting meaningful information from the Twitterverse. SP3 leverages social media related to crisis events. It differs from most existing systems by enabling an analyst to obtain place-relevant information from tweets that have implicit as well as explicit geography. Specifically, SP3 includes not just the ability to utilize the explicit geography of geolocated tweets but also analyze implicit geography by recognizing and geolocating references in both tweet text, which indicates locations tweeted about, and in Twitter profiles, which indicates locations affiliated with users. Key features of SP3 reported here include flexible search and filtering capabilities to support information foraging; an ingest, processing, and indexing pipeline that produces near real-time access for big streaming data; and a novel strategy for implementing a web-based multi-view visual interface with dynamic linking of entities across views. The SP3 system architecture was designed to support crisis management applications, but its design flexibility makes it easily adaptable to other domains. We also report on a user study that provided input to SP3 interface design and suggests next steps for effective spatiotemporal analytics using social media sources.

GeoCorpora: building a corpus to test and train microblog geoparsers
By Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Morteza Karimzadeh, Alan M. MacEachren & Scott Pezanowski
In International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Access http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2017.1368523
In this article, we present the GeoCorpora corpus building framework and software tools as well as a geo-annotated Twitter corpus built with these tools to foster research and development in the areas of microblog/Twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. The developed framework employs crowdsourcing and geovisual analytics to support the construction of large corpora of text in which the mentioned location entities are identified and geolocated to toponyms in existing geographical gazetteers. We describe how the approach has been applied to build a corpus of geo-annotated tweets that will be made freely available to the research community alongside this article to support the evaluation, comparison and training of geoparsers. Additionally, we report lessons learned related to corpus construction for geoparsing as well as insights about the notions of place and natural spatial language that we derive from application of the framework to building this corpus.

Two ChoroPhronesis papers have been accepted to the Immersive Analytics 2017 workshop at IEEE VIS conference in Phoenix, Arizona on October 1st! These are peer-reviewed conference papers, and we will update with the DOI’s once they are assigned.

The first paper is “Take a Walk: Evaluating Movement Types for Data Visualization in Immersive Virtual Reality” by Mark Simpson, Jiayan Zhao, and Alexander Klippel, which concerns a pilot experiment testing the effect different types of movement in virtual environments on interpreting 3D data visualizations. Mark will be presenting the paper at the workshop in person.

The second paper, “Immersive Applications for Informal and Interactive Learning
for Earth Sciences” by Arif Marsur, Jiayan Zhao, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Peter LaFemina, and Alexander Klippel discusses their work on an iVR tool which lets users explore databases by interacting with 3D models and 360 images in a virtual or augmented reality environment. They were accepted into the poster presentation track

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Penn State’s Online Geospatial Education Advisory Board met at The Nittany Lion Inn on August 28. The board provides an annual evaluation of the MGIS degree and our geospatial education certificate programs. The Advisory Board also provides strategic advice on how the programs can best respond to the needs of geospatial professionals and society.

GOOD NEWS

Jennifer Baka’s son, Theodore Henry Baka Lewellen, pictured at right, was born on September 7.

Sam Stehle successfully defended his dissertation on August 17. He started his post-doc at Maynooth University near Dublin, Ireland.

Alumnus Mark Read assumed duties as the Head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, one of the 13 academic departments here at the U.S. Military Academy.

Cindy Zook will be at Pop Up Ave on Saturday, September 23, selling her handmade Goat’s Milk Soap, Super Concentrated Body Butter, and a few Fair Trade African Baskets.

DigitalGlobe, is providing free before/after satellite imagery of areas affected by Hurricane Irma/Jose, from the eastern Caribbean through South Carolina. They have posted the before imagery already, and you can get updates here: https://www.digitalglobe.com/opendata/hurricane-irma/pre-event. Digital Globe is also sponsoring a crowdsourcing imagery analysis and mapping effort to support recovery from Hurricane Harvey. You can access that program here: http://www.tomnod.com/

Online Geospatial Education Student Focus: Augustus WrightWe enjoy hearing from our talented students in the Penn State Online Geospatial Program, especially about what they have learned from our classes and how they plan to apply their certificate/degree.
Chief Warrant Officer 3 Augustus Wright, from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, entered our program in 2015 and just earned his MGIS degree this past Spring. For his capstone project, he studied machine learning algorithms and their applications to geospatial technology (a more detailed summary of his project is at the end of this note).
Chief Wright has served three combat deployments to Iraq and earned two Bronze Star Medals, among several other awards. We are proud of him and all of the veteran and current military students in our program.

The informal settlements that pop up on the edges of many modern cities are often derided as problem areas or slums, ramshackle neighborhoods beset with sanitation issues and crime. To Jose Duarte, however, they are “not a problem to be solved, but a solution that has some problems.”

Brooks elected Fellow of the Society of Wetland ScientistsRobert Brooks, Ruby S. and E. Willard Miller Professor of Geography and Ecology and director of Riparia, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Wetland Scientists, the society’s highest honor, during a ceremony in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in June.

Brooks is a nationally recognized leader in wetland science and policy with more than 35 years of experience in education and research related to inland freshwater wetlands and riverine ecosystems.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

A regional assessment of white-tailed deer effects on plant invasion
By KM Averill, DA Mortensen, EAH Smithwick, S Kalisz, and others
In Annals of Botany Plants, 2017
Access: doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plx047
Herbivores can profoundly influence plant species assembly, including plant invasion, and resulting community composition. Population increases of native herbivores, e.g., white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), combined with burgeoning plant invasions raise concerns for native plant diversity and forest regeneration. While individual researchers typically test for the impact of deer on plant invasion at a few sites, the overarching influence of deer on plant invasion across regional scales is unclear. We tested the effects of deer on the abundance and diversity of introduced and native herbaceous and woody plants across 23 white-tailed deer research sites distributed across the east central and northeastern United States and representing a wide range of deer densities and invasive plant abundance and identity.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Martina Calovi, who is a visiting scholar with the Geoinformatics and Earth Observation (GEO) Laboratory, won the gold prize paper award in the Young Scientists Session at the Conference of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management, Reykjavik, Iceland, in August.

NEWS

September 8 Coffee Hour with Erica SmithwickTransformative Learning Spaces for an Uncertain World
Resilience is about complexity, change, and coping with uncertainty. It depends on a deep understanding of intertwined socio-ecological systems. However, uncertainty and complexity in both socio-ecological systems increasingly hinders decision-making. New knowledges and ontologies are needed to transform society for a mature Anthropocene. Using case studies from Ghana, South Africa, and the Menominee Nation (Wisconsin), Erica Smithwick will explore how biosphere stewardship can be enhanced through transformative research and education approaches that embrace interdisciplinary and cross-cultural ways of knowing.

3:30 to 5:00 p.m.: Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.; the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.

Next week: Hari Osofsky, Penn State Law and School of International Affairs, Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of International Affairs, and Professor of Geography

Department search for assistant professor in urbanization
The Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University invites applicants for a tenure track human geography faculty position in Urbanization at the assistant professor level. We seek a candidate whose research analyzes and addresses the global challenges of urbanization, including topics such as urban social inequality, urban political mobilization and conflict, urban planning in the 21st century, or the challenges of urban sustainability. We encourage applicants who use a range of methodological approaches and scales of analysis, and who have the potential and desire to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines engaged in understanding the fundamental reshaping of physical and human environments brought by urbanization.

From the Summer 2017 GEOGRAPH newsletterRecognition Reception celebrates new spaces, contributions, accomplishments
Students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of the Department of Geography gathered on Friday, April 28, 2017 in Walker Building for the annual Recognition Reception. The purpose of the event was to recognize the accomplishments and contributions made throughout the year by Penn State geographers. This year, the event also celebrated lab renovations in the department.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

Investigating Interactive Video Assessment Tools for Online and Blended Learning
By D Blackstock, S Edel-Malizia, K Bittner, E Smithwick
In ICEL 2017-Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on e-learning
Using digital video as a learning tool is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for instructors to convey content to students. With instructors assigning online videos from sources like Khan Academy, YouTube, TeacherTube, TEDx, PBS Learning Media, and others …

NEWS

The curriculum is an introduction to critical zone science, an emerging field that brings together scientists with diverse backgrounds to study the place where rock, soil, water, air and life meet.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

18 Damage assessment of the urban environment during disasters using volunteered geographic information
By Hultquist, Carolynne, Elena Sava, Guido Cervone, and Nigel Waters
In Big Data for Regional Science (2017).
https://books.google.com/books?id=txIwDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT320&ots=OgGkVG1_Cn&lr&pg=PT320#v=onepage&q&f=false
Cities are more vulnerable than ever due to rapid urbanization and the threats posed by
natural, manmade and technological hazards. The emergence of megacities led to the quick development of facilities needed to supply millions of people with necessary resources, including food, energy, and water.

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions
By Baka, Jennifer
In Antipode, 49: 977–996
doi: 10.1111/anti.12219
This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government’s shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government’s increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.

Political-industrial ecology: An introduction
By Joshua P. Newell, Joshua J.Cousins, Jennifer Baka
In Geoforum
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.024
Political ecology and industrial ecology have emerged as influential, but distinct, intellectual thought traditions devoted to understanding the transformation of nature-society relations and processes. Evolving from the pioneering work by physicists and environmental engineers in the late 1960s (e.g. Ayres and Kneese, 1969), industrial ecology emerged as a distinct field in the 1990s (Graedel and Allenby, 2003). It is a largely normative project that seeks to quantify and dematerialize the resource stocks and flows of industrial ecosystems, product life cycles, and societal metabolisms. To systematically dissect production-consumption processes across cradle-to-grave phases (e.g. extraction, manufacturing, use, reuse), industrial ecology deploys material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, environmental input-output modeling, amongst other methods, and has cultivated more abstract principles and practices such as industrial symbiosis and socio-economic metabolism. As the field has matured, industrial ecology has branched out by becoming more heterogeneous, not only in terms of topical foci and methodology, but also in terms of how it understands the material basis of societal transitions (cf. Vienna School of Social Ecology; Haberl et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the overwhelming focus of industrial ecology is on the material rather than social dimensions of resource use.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Bill Limpisathian (left) graduated with his master of science degree in geography on Sunday, August 12, Penn State’s summer Commencement. With him is his adviser and head of the department, Cynthia Brewer. Congratulations to all our geography grads!

GOOD NEWS

Weekly publication of DoG enews resumes on August 29, 2017. Continue to send your good news, story ideas, and photos from fieldwork and travels to geography@psu.edu.

Welcome to visiting faculty member Nai Yang. He will be here for one year, working on GIScience research topics in collaboration with faculty and students in GeoVISTA. His past research includes a range of topics in 2D and 3D terrain representation and generalization, geovisualization, spatial analysis, and GIS applications.

NEWS

Institutes of Energy and the Environment seed grant recipients announcedGeographers Erica Smithwick and Jennifer Baka among them
The 2017 Institutes for Energy and the Environment (IEE) seed grants have been awarded to a pool of interdisciplinary researchers at Penn State. Thirteen grants totaling more than $312,000 have been awarded to 42 researchers that addressed four of IEE’s five research themes: Climate and Ecosystem Change, Future Energy Supply, Smart Energy Systems, and Water and Biogeochemical Cycles.

PUBLISHED RECENTLY/PRESENTLY

Geographic Accessibility Of Food Outlets Not Associated With Body Mass Index Change Among Veterans, 2009–14
By Shannon N. Zenk, Elizabeth Tarlov, Coady Wing, Stephen A. Matthews, Kelly Jones, Hao Tong and Lisa M. Powell
In Health Affairs
Access http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/36/8/1433.full
In recent years, various levels of government in the United States have adopted or discussed subsidies, tax breaks, zoning laws, and other public policies that promote geographic access to healthy food. However, there is little evidence from large-scale longitudinal or quasi-experimental research to suggest that the local mix of food outlets actually affects body mass index (BMI). We used a longitudinal design to examine whether the proximity of food outlets, by type, was associated with BMI changes between 2009 and 2014 among 1.7 million veterans in 382 metropolitan areas. We found no evidence that either absolute or relative geographic accessibility of supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, or mass merchandisers was associated with changes in an individual’s BMI over time. While policies that alter only geographic access to food outlets may promote equitable access to healthy food and improve nutrition, our findings suggest they will do little to combat obesity in adults.

The Ganges water treaty: 20 years of cooperation, on India’s terms
By Kimberley Anh Thomas
In Water Policy
Access http://wp.iwaponline.com/content/19/4/724
International cooperation has become a universal mandate for governing transboundary waterbodies. Diverse stakeholders promote cooperation as a desirable, if not indispensable, approach to achieving sustainable and equitable benefits from and for transboundary waterbodies. However, calls for international water cooperation operate from the presupposition that cooperation is an unambiguous concept. While cooperation appears self-evident and unproblematic, cases of formal cooperation reveal points of contestation about cooperation itself. For example, India and Bangladesh disagree about the extent to which cooperation is occurring over the Ganges River despite having penned a bilateral treaty that has been in force for 20 years. I analyze qualitative interviews and previously unpublished hydrological data to evaluate assertions that hydrological hazards in Southwestern Bangladesh result from India’s activities and that India is failing to uphold the 1996 agreement. The analysis indicates that these assertions are true and false: India is broadly adhering to the Ganges Treaty but unilaterally withdraws water during a critical period of the dry season when regional livelihoods are most vulnerable. The study concludes that transboundary water cooperation as an abstract ideal overlooks the fact that cooperation as a practice emerges from and operates within specific historical, political, cultural, and economic contexts.

A cloud-enabled automatic disaster analysis system of multi-sourced data streams: An example synthesizing social media, remote sensing and Wikipedia data
By Qunying Huang, Guido Cervone, Guiming Zhang
In Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
Access https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2017.06.004
Social media streams and remote sensing data have emerged as new sources for tracking disaster events, and assessing their damages. Previous studies focus on a case-by-case approach, where a specific event was first chosen and filtering criteria (e.g., keywords, spatiotemporal information) are manually designed and used to retrieve relevant data for disaster analysis. This paper presents a framework that synthesizes multi-sourced data (e.g., social media, remote sensing, Wikipedia, and Web), spatial data mining and text mining technologies to build an architecturally resilient and elastic solution to support disaster analysis of historical and future events. Within the proposed framework, Wikipedia is used as a primary source of different historical disaster events, which are extracted to build an event database. Such a database characterizes the salient spatiotemporal patterns and characteristics of each type of disaster. Additionally, it can provide basic semantics, such as event name (e.g., Hurricane Sandy) and type (e.g., flooding) and spatiotemporal scopes, which are then tuned by the proposed procedures to extract additional information (e.g., hashtags for searching tweets), to query and retrieve relevant social media and remote sensing data for a specific disaster. Besides historical event analysis and pattern mining, the cloud-based framework can also support real-time event tracking and monitoring by providing on-demand and elastic computing power and storage capabilities. A prototype is implemented and tested with data relative to the 2011 Hurricane Sandy and the 2013 Colorado flooding.

Guerrilla Cartography, a cartographic arts organization and creator of Food: An Atlas, has announced a Kickstarter campaign for its sister project, Water: An Atlas. A collection of more than 80 maps, Water: An Atlas is a crowdsourced atlas that portrays water trends, usage issues and global events all created by volunteer cartographers from around the world. For inquiries, please contact: Darin Jensen (djensen@guerrillacartography.org)

NEWS

PASDA Map URLs changing
Some of the URLs at Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) are going to change on August 7, 2017. This only affects FTP and Map Services; the website is unchanged and is still at www.pasda.psu.edu.

PASDA is Pennsylvania’s official public access geospatial information clearinghouse. PASDA was developed in 1996 by Penn State and has served as the clearinghouse for Pennsylvania for over twenty years.

All FTP traffic should be redirected to the following new FTP URL paths:
ftp://ftp.pasda.psu.edu/pub/pasda —replaces ftp://www.pasda.psu.edu/pub/pasda)
ftp://ftp.pasda.psu.edu/pub/pasda/pamap/ — (replaces ftp://pamap.pasda.psu.edu)

Links to these new URLs are up-to-date on the website. If you have bookmarks, code, or MXDs that consume PASDA map services, you may need to update your local content to reflect the changes. Questions may be directed to Ryan Baxter.

NSF grant supports research into geospatial intelligence during civil rights era
During the civil rights movement, activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used geography and geospatial intelligence to identify protest sites and to plan civil rights protests. A new $373,000 National Science Foundation grant is letting researchers dig into those geospatial tactics to see what can be learned about patterns of racial inequality and how the SNCC collected and leveraged geospatial intelligence data to bolster its activist efforts.

“Geospatial intelligence has become a burgeoning field in geography,” said Joshua Inwood, associate professor of geography and senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. “For us to understand this area fully, we need to consider how a range of different groups of people are engaged with the collection and understanding of geographic information and its potential to effect change. SNCC was a great collector of geography during its time.”

Farnsworth receives 2017 Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence
Robert J. Farnsworth, a retired U.S. Army reconnaissance engineer and Penn State alumnus, was selected to receive the 2017 Lt. Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence. He was honored during the 2017 United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) Symposium in San Antonio on June 5.

Farnsworth was presented with the award by Keith J. Masback, CEO of USGIF; Nancy S. Coleman, vice president of corporate communications at DigitalGlobe; and Todd S. Bacastow, geospatial intelligence faculty member with the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ John A. Dutton e-Education Institute.

Researchers receive USDA grant to study new riparian buffer strategyRob Brooks and Riparia staff are participating in the project
A team led by researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct a three-year study of a new flexible strategy to ramp up installation of riparian buffers.

RECENTLY/PRESENTLY PUBLISHED

Looking through a different lens: Examining the inequality-mortality association in U.S. counties using spatial panel models.
By TC Yang, SA Matthews, K Park (2017)
In Applied Geography 86, 139-151
Access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622816306397
Two areas still need further examination in the ecological study of inequality and mortality. First, the evidence for the relationship between income inequality and mortality remains inconclusive, particularly when the analytic unit is small (e.g., county in the U.S.). Second, most previous studies are cross-sectional and are unable to address the recent diverging patterns whereby mortality has decreased and income inequality increased. This study aims to contribute to both topic areas by studying the relationship between inequality and mortality via a spatiotemporal approach that simultaneously considers the spatial structure and the temporal trends of inequality and mortality using county panel data between 1990 and 2010 for the conterminous U.S. Using both spatial panel random effect and spatial panel fixed effect models, we found that (a) income inequality was not a significant factor for mortality after taking into account the spatiotemporal structure and the most salient factors for mortality (e.g., socioeconomic status); (b) the spatial panel fixed effect model indicated that income inequality was negatively associated with mortality over the time, a relationship mirroring the diverging patterns; and (c) the significant spatial and temporal fixed effects suggested that both dimensions are critical factors in understanding the inequality-mortality relationship in the U.S. Our findings lend support to the argument that income inequality does not affect mortality and suggest that the cross-sectional findings may be a consequence of ignoring the temporal trends.

The legacy of slavery and contemporary declines in heart disease mortality in the US South
By MR Kramer, NC Black, SA Matthews, SA James (2017)
In SSM-Population Health 3, 609-617
Access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827317300460
Nearly 50 years of declining heart disease mortality is a major public health success, but one marked by uneven progress by place and race. At the county level, progress in heart disease mortality reduction among Blacks is associated with place-based historical legacy of slavery. Effective and equitable public health prevention efforts should consider the historical context of place and the social and economic institutions that may play a role in facilitating or impeding diffusion of prevention efforts thereby producing heart healthy places and populations.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Penn State highlighted the art of science and the science of art at a booth during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Alex Klippel demonstrates how his lab enables one take a virtual 360-degree field trip to Brazil, Belize, Iceland, and historic University Park campus with virtual reality headsets.

GOOD NEWS

For the summer, DoG news will be published every other week. Continue to send your good news, story ideas, and photos from fieldwork and travels to geography@psu.edu.

Now is the time to submit projects for Undergraduate Research Opportunity Connection (UROC) for fall 2017. Projects due by Sunday, July 30. To learn more and submit projects visit: www.geog.psu.edu/uroc

Welcome to visiting Ph.D. student, Ekaterina Chuprikova, who is joining us from the Technische Universität München. Her dissertation is focused on “validation of global land cover data, predictive analysis and spatial-temporal uncertainty estimation and visualisation.” Over the next couple of months, she will be exchanging ideas with faculty and students in GeoVISTA and the department about these and related topics. Her desk is in 206A Walker Building.

Alex Klippel has been named an Associate in the Institute for Cyber Science

A visualization to show forest development under climate change led by ChoroPhronesis member Jiawei Huang in collaboration with Melissa Lucasch, Robert Scheller, and Alexander Klippel, won third prize in the VISTAS contest. Our VIFF (viff.psu.edu) group tested a workflow of translating LANDIS-II output into virtual reality for the very first time, creating this video of the Willow Creek LTER:www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuRYGTdrwXM&feature=youtu.be&t=4s

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

Street naming and the politics of belonging [book chapter]
By Derek Alderman, Joshua Inwood
In The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place
By Reuben Rose-Redwood (’02g,’06g), Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu
Access: https://books.google.com/books?id=QkYrDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT313&ots=cY6JWRaNMe&lr&pg=PT313#v=onepage&q&f=false
Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

NEWS

Online Geospatial Education Student Focus: Jim DalyWe love hearing from our talented students in the Penn State online geospatial program, especially about what they have learned from our classes and how they plan to apply their certificate/degree.
Jim Daly, from Huntington, New York, entered our program in Fall 2013 and is on track to complete his MGIS degree in 2018. For his capstone project, he plans to pursue developing an online subdivision and zoning web map application for local municipalities and residents. The purpose of the application would be to identify property subject to certain state and municipal subdivision and zoning laws based on proximity to environmental features and governmental jurisdictions.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

HLPE Report #11: Sustainable forestry for food security and nutrition
By HLPE Project Team members: Terence Sunderland (Team Leader), Fernande Abanda , Ronnie de Camino Velozo, Patrick Matakala, Peter May, Anatoly Petrov, Bronwen Powell, Bhaskar Vira, Camilla Widmark
Committee on World Food Security (CFS)
Video conference with panel: http://www.fao.org/webcast/home/en/item/4399/icode/
Download a PDF of the report: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/hlpe/hlpe_documents/HLPE_Reports/HLPE-Report-11_EN.pdf
In October 2014, the CFS requested the HLPE to conduct a study on Sustainable Forestry for Food Security and Nutrition. The HLPE is now launching the report in FAO. Q&A session will follow the presentation (link to agenda below). Forests and trees contribute to food security and nutrition (FSN) in multiple ways. They provide wood, energy, foods and other products, generate income and employment, delivering ecosystem services vital for FSN, including water and carbon cycle regulation and protection of biodiversity. Increasing and competing demands on land, forests and trees create new challenges and opportunities and impact FSN. This report calls for a renewed understanding of sustainable forestry in order to fully integrate the different functions of forests and trees, from farm and landscape to global levels, as well as at different timescales, for enhanced FSN and sustainable development. This requires inclusive and integrative governance mechanisms at different scales that enable the full and effective participation of concerned stakeholders, particularly of forest-dependent indigenous peoples and local communities.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Robert Brooks (left) receives an award recognizing him as a Fellow of the Society of Wetland Scientists at the society’s annual conference held in June 2017, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. SWS President Gillian Davies (right) presents the award. Photo by SWS.

GOOD NEWS

For the summer, DoG news will be published every other week. Continue to send your good news, story ideas, and photos from fieldwork and travels to geography@psu.edu.

Robert J. Farnsworth, a retired US Army Reconnaissance Engineer, and Lt. Drew Cavanagh, US Coast Guard, received the 2017 Lt. Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence. Farnsworth was presented with the award at GEOINT 2017. Cavanagh will be recognized at Penn State’s Military Appreciation Day Nov. 11, 2017.

Giselle Redila (undergraduate IST major and ChoroPhronesis intern) received a Penn State Student Engagement Network Grant. She will be working on immersive visual
analytics projects this summer.

Guoqiang Peng (incoming visiting scholar from Nanjing Normal University) received a Chinese Scholarship Council 2017 Scholarship and will be joining ChoroPhronesis this fall.

Yu Zhong (undergraduate intern at ChoroPhronesis) was accepted into the Schreyer Honors College.

Thanks to mobile app developments led by Jan Oliver Wallgrün, ChoroPhronesis has released the beta version of its first app via the google app store.

NEWS

Brooks elected Fellow of the Society of Wetland Scientists
Robert P. Brooks was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Wetland Scientists at the society’s annual conference held in June 2017, San Juan, Puerto Rico. A Fellow is the highest recognition of membership bestowed by the society. Nominees must be active society members who have been nominated by other active members to receive the honor, recommended by the Fellows Committee and elected by the SWS board of directors.

Brooks is a nationally recognized leader in wetland science and policy with more than 35 years of experience working in inland freshwater wetlands and riverine ecosystems.

“Dr. Brooks has served in a professorial role for over 35 years, educating students of all ages. Whether through formal classroom teaching, laboratories and field trips, or numerous outreach events, he always finds ways to ignite the passion of his students. His love and dedication to the subject—wetlands, other aquatic ecosystems, and their wildlife and biota—are noteworthy, and have not faded,” said his nominator, Christopher B. Craft, the Janet Duey Professor of Rural Land Policy, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.

“Beyond formal appointments, Dr. Brooks leads by example, through diligent and sustained professional activities, setting an example for students and colleagues in wetland science and related fields. What stands out about Rob’s career is how he seeks to integrate research, teaching, outreach, and service endeavors, as he and his students and staff add to the knowledge base about wetlands, and their place in watersheds, and communicate the importance of aquatic ecosystems to varied audiences,” Craft said.

Brooks is currently the Ruby S. and E. Willard Miller Professor of Geography and Ecology, and Director of Riparia at Penn State, a center “where science informs policy and practice.”

Researchers create virtual mobile tour of University Park campus
From the 1915 class gift of the Old Main sundial to the 2013 “We Are” structure, Penn Staters have a rich history of contributing back to the University. As new landmarks and class gifts sprout up across the University Park campus, it’s often difficult for the average visitor to keep track of each gift’s location and history.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHEDQuantifying space, understanding minds: A visual summary approach
By Mark Simpson, Kai-Florian Richter, Jan Oliver Wallgrün and Alexander Klippel
In Journal of Spatial Information Science
Access: doi:10.5311/JOSIS.2017.14.292
This paper presents an illustrated, validated taxonomy of research that compares spatial measures to human behavior. Spatial measures quantify the spatial characteristics of environments, such as the centrality of intersections in a street network or the accessibility of a room in a building from all the other rooms. While spatial measures have been of interest to spatial sciences, they are also of importance in the behavioral sciences for use in modeling human behavior. A high correlation between values for spatial measures and specific behaviors can provide insights into an environment’s legibility, and contribute to a deeper understanding of human spatial cognition. Research in this area takes place in several domains, which makes a full understanding of existing literature difficult. To address this challenge, we adopt a visual summary approach. Literature is analyzed, and recurring topics are identified and validated with independent inter-rater agreement tasks in order to create a robust taxonomy for spatial measures and human behavior. The taxonomy is then illustrated with a visual representation that allows for at-a-glance visual access to the content of individual research papers in a corpus. A public web interface has been created that allows interested researchers to add to the database and create visual summaries for their research papers using our taxonomy.